'Crash Into Me' by Albert Borris

I know people don't like to admit what I'm about to admit but I bought this book for it's cover. It jumped out at me and when I read the dust jacket I was hooked. There aren't that many teen books narrated by boys, this is mostly a girls market but this one had the potential to stand out. Finally teen girls could read a book that wasn't about dragons or basketball but life, from the voice of the great unknown, a boy.

'Crash Into Me' centers around four main characters, two boys and two girls. They all meet online in a chat room. All are from different areas and different backgrounds. They only have one thing in common, they all want to commit suicide. So they create a pact, a gruesome one. They will go on a road trip, each picking one place of someone famous they admire who committed suicide and visit the place of their death, at the end of the trip they will commit suicide together in Death Valley California. I know morbid right? Why on earth does anyone want to read about four misfits who all have designs on self inflicted death. Well, it could have been great if done better, but honestly at the end of the book instead of feeling for the characters and wishing them well I was hoping they'd think up a great way to go and off themselves. Now I realize that since this is a teen book it shouldn't glorify suicide, but the book itself does that on it's own. The author picks cult heroes of suicide for his characters to visit, Kurt Cobain, and Ernest Hemingway etc. He picked the coolest of the cool, the manly man who shot himself with an Abercrombie and Fitch pistol and the grunge rock god of the 90's. If he wasn't intending to glorify suicide he did a very poor job of it.

The four teenagers had the potential to be great characters giving teens something to look at and say "hey I know how that feels." There's the lesbian who's afraid to come out to her rigid family, the son who doesn't live up to his fathers dreams for him, a boy who blames himself for the death of his older brother, and the girl who didn't know how to cope after a break up. You want to like these kids but they fall flat amongst the bickering and complaining. You fall out of love with the kids you should be rooting for to not off themselves. This book may speak to some but I'm not sure this is one for the masses, there will not be any underground cult following for these four. And so one more time I learn the lesson. . . you cannot judge a book by it's cover cause this one just falls short.

Teen Book Crack gives it ** out of ***** stars :(